


you're one of my tribe

by garden of succulents (staranise)



Series: better than you found them [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Bisexuals bonding over queerness, Gen, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 06:26:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13653315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents
Summary: Andy was the first queer friend Kent had ever had.





	you're one of my tribe

**Author's Note:**

> Happens at the same time as the first three parts of [Campsites](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9048454/chapters/20587339).
> 
> Some readers might take exception to Kent mentally classifying Jack as "straight". It's a complicated question, and Kent's reckoning with incomplete data. I'm not writing the perfect thing someone should think, but what I think Kent probably thought and felt at the time.
> 
> Also, fair warning, Andy calls another (offscreen) woman a bitch.

Andy was the first queer friend he'd ever had.

Kent's mom said she'd had a lesbian friend when he was about five, someone who'd lived in their apartment building with a son around Kent's age; Kent thinks he can vaguely remember playing with the toys in Reggie's apartment, the Speak-n-Spell they had there, eating apple slices with peanut butter on them. Then Reggie had moved to New Jersey, and Kent moved upstate, and they just fell out of touch. Reggie preserved him longer than he had any right to, the way his mom held her up as proof that she _did_ have gay friends when the environment allowed for it, but...

He'd expected the weather in Canada to be _harsh_ in the sense that it stripped you bare, dried your bones; didn't allow for life or movement. But it wasn't like that. Even in winter, there were belugas, wolves and moose and chickadees, and you wrapped up warm enough to survive; it wasn't like he'd imagined, freezing to death in a tent covered in snow. And... kind of like that, he'd been _aware_ of probably-gay boys in his school, of couples marrying on the news in Toronto and Montreal, and the possibility came true enough for him to have _something_ with Jack. It was enough to survive on, even if it felt like he imagined living on berries would be like. Scant.

Jack wasn't a queer friend; nothing he did or said hinted at queerness with one big exception. They never talked about it. He was a straight friend Kent sometimes had sex with. And that distinction had been exactly what ended up fucking them over so badly.

The next time Kent talked to Andy after the night in Colorado where he came out to her, she was heading through Aces HQ carrying a plastic bin full of paper just as the team was coming out of practice and heading upstairs for strategy. She could have beaten them to the stairs but she stepped back, and Helly and Carly didn't even seem to notice as they plunged on right in front of her. She stood back, looking at nothing in particular, as the team clomped past. Kent arranged to be at the back of the group, and fell in beside her when she finally started mounting the stairs.

"Sorry," he said, with a vague gesture at the team. "We got in your way."

"I don't mind," she said with a little grin, and bobbed her head at the pack ahead of them. "Nice landscape."

They were, in fact, on a level with the last butts of the pack; from this angle the Aces were nothing but a roiling sea of taut butts in black track pants and broad shoulders in white. Kent got her joke, grinned--looked sideways, saw her still grinning--and then something clicked on for him: _She knows I'm bisexual. We're both looking at the same thing._

They grinned slyly at each other, and when she reached her door to turn off into the business offices, he lifted a hand to her shoulder to give her a push away, hiding his smile in the collar of his jacket. By the time he got to Strategy, he was totally straight-faced.

After he told her the Saga of Jack, she repaid his trust by telling him the Love Quadrangle of Doom story from her junior year of college. She did it brightly, with hand motions, like it was funny, and he laughed and groaned when she expected him to, but underneath there was a level where it wasn't funny at all. It was just shitty, and sad, and he said so.

That seemed to shock her out of her funny mood and she nodded, soberly, and reached for the plate of french fries they were sharing. She didn't respond until after the waitress had come and asked if there was anything else they wanted, since the hotel kitchen was closing up soon; Kent said they didn't. When the waitress was out of earshot Andy shrugged and said, "Yeah, well. I try not to think about that too much. Though--I tell you what. I'd be a lot more bitter about it if that bitch hadn't gotten cut from the Whitecaps in training camp. At least now I don't have to pretend to cheer for her anymore."

Kent patted her hand, which felt artificial and weird, and she held his hand for a minute, squeezed, and let go. "Thanks," she said glumly.

She'd taken an actual Gender and Sexuality class in college. She told him about it one night when came to her apartment to visit Sydney, pulled up the syllabus on her laptop and showed him the anthology _20th Century Lesbian Writers_ that was still on her bookshelf.

"I can't believe this is actually a thing," he said, grinning in disbelief. "The _Queer Studies Department?_ A whole actual _department?_ "

"That real people make a living at," she said, a little like she couldn't believe it either. "Visiting Eminent Scholar of Queer Studies. You can get your degree in it too."

"This is amazing," he said, tapping on her keyboard. " _Queer methods and methodologies._ How do they even get away with it?"

"That's not as dirty as you think," she parried dryly. "People study all kinds of things. My friend used to text me the weirdest books she could find in the library stacks. _Social History of the Potato. A Literary History of Wallpaper._ "

"Those are _not_ real books," he accused.

"You don't believe me? Give me that." She reached for her laptop and, after Google failed her, pulled up her university's library website and located the listings for Redcliffe Salaman and E. A. Entwhistle.

"Okay, but," he said. "What's that kind of thing," (obviously not meaning potatoes or wallpaper) " _about?_ "

Andy was quiet for a minute, and reached out to lure her cat back when all the fighting over the laptop had temporarily chased her away. "It's about being able to imagine a different kind of future," she said finally. "Like, everything in our society is so _squeezed_ into these boxes. Boy, girl, boy, girl. So when two guys want to marry people ask, 'Who will be wearing the dress?' because they can't imagine a wedding without a wedding dress."

(Kent silently resolved not to tell her that he'd had those kinds of perplexities considering his _own_ hypothetical marriage, a few years ago.)

"There's all this work that goes into saying who should be what gender and how," she continued, not lighting on his moment of inner turmoil, "and I guess it's a question of, what's necessary? What can be changed? Is it possible that someday we can create a future where all of this is different? How can we get there? Because like, my grandma, she played hockey with the boys when she was a kid, but she stopped when she was really young because girls didn't do that kind of thing. But I always grew up knowing girls could. So... what if little kids grew up knowing they could turn out to be gay and that would be just fine?"

So he had to admit that Queer Studies wasn't total bullshit, though he still sometimes laughed at her for it, especially when he'd look over and see her watching the team with a bemused look on her face, and slide over and ask, "What're they socially constructing _now,_ huh?"

On those Sydney-nights, she told him about her cat's name, and how Sydney Bristow had been her first crush, and they watched their way through her box sets of _Alias_ , and Kent watched the same character for three episodes straight before he took his heart out of his mouth long enough to say, "He's cute."

Andy grinned and elbowed him like she understood exactly how momentous that was for him, and he grinned back, shaky with relief. And he said it more often after that, especially once she taught him how to be subtle whe ogling people in public. He already knew how not to look like he was looking, so that was easy, but he had to pick up the little things, like shading one hand with the other while you pointed at them, or casually getting up to drop a coffee cup in the garbage and get a look at someone you'd been told about--the kinds of things the rest of the Aces probably _should_ have known, and didn't.

Jensy grinned and elbowed him when the team was walking up the steps, and Kent dropped back to join Andy, waiting for the herd to go past at their base, so they could walk up together. It probably looked like he was flirting with her, and maybe a little bit, he was.

But more importantly, it was so they could watch the butts.


End file.
